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Management Kits is proud to be part of this year’s Disruption Innovation Festival (DIF) line-up. Presenting a webinar on Wednesday 9 November at 11.00 – 12.00 GTM (12.00 – 13.00 Zürich time), Management Kits founder Olaf Bach explores how organizations can organize for disruption and maintain effectiveness and adaptability in the face of disruptive change.

There is much talk about how 20th century corporate structures built to exploit stable business models are not fit to enable the constant generation of new ideas or to face disruptive change. At the same time, any effort aimed at exploring the unknown and facilitating change in the economy at large requires organizations: systems designed to solve complex problems in a collaborative way that makes the collective output larger than the sum of its parts.

We will employ our prototype Organizational Structure Kit to explore key elements of organizing in the light of the challenges of disruptive change in the entrepreneurial environment. For example, how do you derive implications of your strategy for your organization design under conditions of extreme uncertainty? For which of your activities do you create protected spaces because you wager that the reward will appear in the medium to long term? And how, on the other hand, do you organize activities for learning through experiments with a high risk of failure? How do you define organizational units – and how do you learn to constantly redefine them in the face of change? How do you ensure collaboration across units and foster the generation of dynamic capabilities on a social system level? And finally, how do you deal with hierarchy as a form of institutionalized decision making power, when the relevance of past track records and experiences – and the half-life of competencies – are less and less relevant given technological and societal change?

Our presentation will leverage the kit board canvas of the Organizational Structure Kit to discuss key elements of organization design under conditions of disruptive change.

Management Kits is a business design initiative at the interface of academia and practice that translates insights from research and practice into platforms for business and organization design. We believe that technological and societal innovation needs to be accompanied and enabled by management innovation: new, practicable, and context-specific ideas on how to organize collaborative, goal-oriented activity.